Gruntled

This week, Solana went from everything to everywhere. From the check-in counters at Tokyo Haneda Airport to the traditional trading floors and into the hands of AI agents, Solana is the backbone for it all. Here's what happened this week: 📰 Headline News - @WisdomTreeFunds expanded its full suite of regulated tokenized funds to Solana - @21shares launched JSOL, the first European ETP backed by @jito_sol - @SolanaFndn unveiled Contra, a new enterprise payment stack 📰 Launches - @SolanaConf Accelerate USA lands in Miami on May 5, 2026 - @moonbirds, @Mantle_Official, @infinex, and @HyperliquidX tokens went live on Solana - @JupiterExchange shipped Jupiter Global with QR Pay, Virtual Currency Accounts and USDC Credit Card - @WEAJapan’s first USDC retail pilot launched at Tokyo Haneda Airport on Solana - @TradeNeutral has launched JLP Delta Neutral - @HalbornSecurity released the SSTS open-source framework for compliant onchain securities - @fuseenergy demoed its Energy Network product - @SuperstateInc's USCC went live as a collateral on @Kamino - @Polymarket launched on Jupiter, bringing the predictions platform to Solana for the first time - @MarinadeFinance introduced Dynamic Commission for validators to set custom rates - @GhostWareOS shipped GhostSwap, a private cross-chain swap - @SolanaFloor launched an institutional livestream - @mtndao summit started at Salt Lake City - @bulktrade released 500 testnet access passes 📰 Milestones - Tokenized stock value on Solana hit an ATH of $230M - @orogoldapp TVL surged past $3M - @RemoraMarkets crossed $7M in TVL - @encifherio reached 14M volume in private beta If you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, please share it with an RT. This week's cover art by @inkartluis 🔥

The @veloprotocol team need to get their act together. Doing the absolute bare minimum to keep your investors informed shouldn't be this hard. While we're already dealing with difficult market conditions, the way this team handles communication and community has made things feel unnecessarily worse. Retail investors are treated as an afterthought. The structure in place right now basically removes any real accountability. Promises get made, timelines are ignored, and there's rarely any follow-through or honest explanation. A few things that stand out the most: 1- The TG group is basically useless at this point. The moderators seem outsourced and paid by how many messages they send, so the chat stays "active" with the same recycled memes, gifs, and copy-paste small talk every single day. They can't answer ANY project-related questions. There are zero team members in there. Ask for any sort of update and you get the classic "we'll forward this to the team" line, then nothing. It feels engineered to wear people down until they just leave. 2- The X account comes across like it's run by an intern / agency that doesn't get it. Posts are almost always generic fluff: general market updates, vague bullish vibes, or retweets from the same "project mentions" aggregator. No real updates. The replies under almost every post are full of people calling this out, yet it keeps happening. Pat, the COO, was directly asked about this in an AMA late last year and said they'd improve it. NOTHING has changed since. 3- The only time we get anything close to real info is when the community begs for weeks and Pat finally does a 30-minute AMA in Telegram (maybe two or three times a year). Even then, a lot of answers boil down to "can't talk about it" or "we'll share more soon." Then silence for another three to six months. The community feels gutted because of this. Telegram is mostly spammers and mods talking to themselves to hit post quotas. X is just noise. Instead of posting generic fluff, how about giving us updates on the below? 1- Last year's supply "clarification" (jump from 7B to 17B) was handled terribly. Mods kept insisting the supply was locked at 7B right up until it wasn't. Part of the justification was needing tokens to back a big chunk of USDV. So what actually happened with that USDV? Where is it sitting now and how is it being used? 2- After the backlash from that supply update, the team said they'd hold off on releasing more of their own portion as a goodwill move. Any timeline on when (or if) that actually happens? Price has only gone lower since then. Another surprise release would be brutal right now. What's the real plan here? 3- @Beam_Lightnet said back in September that $VELO would become the backbone of Lightnet's B2B settlement engine by Q4 2025 (attached image). We asked Pat about this about three months ago and he called it top priority. What's the current status? 4- The Omnipoint partnership looked interesting on paper, but from the outside it seems like almost no adoption or traction. Can we get a proper update on where it stands and what it means going forward? 5- What ever came of the older announcements around Solana, Paxos, digital gold, and the other partnerships that got hyped months or even years ago? Any progress worth mentioning, or are they quietly shelved? 6- The Orbit "Super App" launched months back and then, crickets. How about an update on performance since launch, plans to scale, expand its usage, etc? The effort required to get things in order when it comes to communication and community management is actually very small and would go such a long way; the team's refusal to address it is alarming. Maybe because the current setup absolves them from any sort of urgency, accountability, or responsibility.